Call centers have it rough. Whether they are selling through cold calls, supporting existing customers, or conducting research for outside companies, individual contributors at call centers are often overworked and underappreciated.
If left unaddressed, this can lead to a stressful work environment and poor performance. The reality: more than ever call center employees need motivation and coaching more than ever to increase productivity and boost morale. We have gathered 5 major pain points for call center leaders and individual contributors, along with solutions to address those problems.
1. High Staff Turnover
Call centers face historically high employee turnover rates, between 30 – 45%, which severely damages productivity. Bringing in new employees requires putting in additional time and resources to train them and get them ready to work independently. This causes a major pain point for call centers who are stuck in the hiring and onboarding train with no stop in sight. Onboarding can help ramp employees to get them productive faster. This can be accomplished with coaching, which reinforces the right behaviors and continues to employee development once they’re ramped. Starting off strong with new employees is key to retention in the long run. Happy employees stay – motivate them and give them the tools to self-correct and watch their productivity skyrocket.
2. Low Employee Engagement
Monotonous jobs can quickly kill excitement and motivation. Life in a call center can become monotonous quickly, resulting in employees mentally checking out and eventually leaving the company. Gamification via leaderboards, contest, and interactive TV broadcasts can help motivate people while also keeping the workday interesting. Try giving employees incentives to meet and surpass goals through contests. (Need contest ideas? Check out our eBook!)
3. Poor First Call Resolution Rate (FCR)
FCR is one of the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for call centers. In fact, a recent study, 68% of people claimed that FCR is one of their most important criteria for call center satisfaction. However, due to the increasing complexity of problems raised by customers, FCR is becoming harder to achieve. The average consumer must call a company 2.3 times before having issues resolved – and future purchase intent drops from 76% to 55% with the second call. The good news? This can be fixed with gamification and coaching! Make goals and performance against FCR highly visible to help show employees where they can improve and then coach them accordingly. Improvements in first contact resolution alone typically improve customer retention by as much as 15-30 percent – that’s a big deal!
4. Increased Number of Communication Channels
Today consumers are not just using phones. They email, tweet, text, and utilize technology in any way possible. This makes it challenging for call center staff to decide on the right medium, causing customer concerns to go unanswered. An easy fix is to set goals for your employees. For example, set goals for each employee to reply to 15 tweets, texts, emails, and calls a day. This ensures that they are keeping track of customers on all mediums. Another way to accomplish this is to create informal teams to address different channels. Creating a Twitter team, email team, and phone team allows goals to be tracked individually and no communication channels to be forgotten.
5. Poor Integration of your Tech Stack
Like many businesses today, call centers are riddled with various specifically-purposed software. Taking advantage of technology is paramount, but it’s easy to get lost in vast offerings. Take a fresh look at your sales stack and see what can be dropped while also looking for possibilities for combining solutions within one platform. For example, many LevelEleven customers find that they were able to consolidate their TV broadcast, gamification, and coaching solutions. This clears some of the technology clutter while also ensuring that you are utilizing your current software to its full potential.
All businesses face challenges and no two are quite alike. Call centers have unique challenges that can easily cause a team to disintegrate if not addressed. With gamification and coaching, call centers can transform their onboarding process, increase employee satisfaction, and ensure happy customers.[su_button url=”https://leveleleven.com/product-tour/” target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#E84E38″ color=”#ffffff” size=”8″ center=”yes” radius=”round”]Tour Our Products![/su_button]
